By Jordan Batchelor.
Are you interested in science and technology? Do you seek out information online to learn more about specific issues? When you read about ‘new breakthroughs’ in academia, are you immediately skeptical or do you inherently trust it?
For decades, government organizations world-wide have been interested in answering questions like these. For example, in the US, the National Science Foundation (NSF) publishes a biennial report called Indicators aimed at policy makers (the President and Congress are part of its target audience). It systematically collects information on the state of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in education, labor, and research, including a chapter dedicated to the public knowledge about and attitudes toward science.
As you might guess, it’s not just government entities that are interested in such topics but researchers in the social sciences as well. This type of investigation has sometimes been referred to as the public understanding of science, or PUS (that’s the name of this blog!).
Recently, I added my own contribution to this field in an article published in Public Understanding of Science. I was interested in the idea of examining attitudes toward science and related topics in an online context, namely the social media website Reddit. Reddit has a number of large forums called ‘subreddits’ dedicated to science topics (such as space, environment, and biology, among others). The largest subreddit—and the one I looked at in my article—is called r/science, which includes daily posts and discussions about research published across the world of academia.
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I was not the first to examine this kind of forum, but few had considered it as a source of naturally-expressed attitudes about science. You see, many large-scale projects—like the NSF indicators mentioned earlier—generally rely on phone, computer, and/or face-to-face surveys. Obviously, these methods are crucial to social science research, but in the digital age, the contexts available for ‘data’ collection are expanding. I saw r/science as one of those new contexts. I collected about 7.7 million words from 175,000 different comments made to r/science over a three-year period and set off to mine these comments for (some of) the attitudes expressed about science and academic research generally.
It was difficult to figure out how to find these attitudes in the comments. Neither entirely manual (e.g., reading thousands of individual comments) nor automatic (e.g., using computer software to ‘tag’ words for their semantic content) methods were very appealing. In the end, I developed a protocol that was partially manual and partially automatic—not without its limitations but a good place to start. I identified some of the most common nouns relating to science in the database of comments (e.g., study, theory, psychology) and looked at the other words around them to get a better picture of what negative attitudes were being expressed, if any.
I found that negative comments related to two separate but related worlds—that of professional academia and that of ‘popular science’. A number of commenters lamented the politicization of academia, the way findings can be misrepresented to attract readers, and the tendency for some researchers to extrapolate conclusions from data that don’t support them. This overall skepticism was most severe when discussing the ‘soft sciences’, especially psychology. Angela Cassidy (2014) has argued elsewhere that communicating social science research with the public involves unique challenges relative to the natural and life sciences, and some of my data supports this argument. Here’s an example comment from my dataset:
These psychology articles always have such vague premises and words, what makes a person “nice” and “agreeable.” This sub has too many of these making it to hot, more often than not the conclusions they come to are common sense.
Some nouns here like ‘psychology’, ‘articles’, and ‘conclusions’ were those that I specifically searched for, and the contexts around these words make it clear that this particular commenter is negatively valuating psychology research. Comments like these suggest that communicators of social science research face particular challenges when attempting to share their findings to the general public.
Negative evaluations were even more prevalent around nouns relating to popular science, or the communication of academic research to lay audiences. Some nouns explored in this part were reporting, experts, journalism, and layman. It is difficult to determine whether these negative attitudes were born of inherent bias or actual experiences, but it’s clear that many commenters were dismissive of research news communicated through popular sources. Here’s an example of this kind of attitude:
Bad science journalism has been around as long as science has been. It’s not some new “activist streak,” and you can still trust scientists (be careful with science journalists).
Just like with the challenges faced by the social sciences, science communicators like journalists apparently face certain barriers when convincing audiences that they’re credible enough to explain the complex world of academic research. One very practical issue—which also influenced the title of my article—was the (in)accuracy of headlines. The nouns title, headline, and headlines were almost only mentioned alongside words like editorialized, misleading, sensationalized, and clickbait. Given that headlines are likely the first thing a reader will interact with, this area appears to be a crucial battleground for convincing readers that a given article is as much about accuracy as it is newsworthiness.
It was fun and insightful to mine these comments for science attitudes, but the study is far from definitive and more research of all shapes is needed to track huge issues like a general public’s attitudes toward science.
Read the original article: Just another clickbait title: A corpus-driven investigation of negative attitudes toward science on Reddit
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Jordan Batchelor is a doctoral candidate in Applied Linguistics & ESL at Georgia State University. His research interests involve written online communication about topics related to science, health, and society from a corpus linguistics perspective.